Clifton F. Hodge
American naturalist (1859–1949)
Clifton Fremont Hodge (16 October 1859 – 1949) was an American professor of physiology who worked at Clark University. An educator and a keen experimental biologist, he took great interest in natural history, animal behavior, and public understanding of biology, taking an active role in public debates on vivisection, experimentation on animals, conservation, and evolution. He opposed a bounty offered for specimens of the last few passenger pigeons which was eventually withdrawn. His textbook Civic Biology (1919) was the last biology text dealing with evolution before the anti-evolution movement began in 1920.
Biography
Hodge was born in Janesville, Wisconsin on 16 October 1859 to Mary (Merrill) and Nelson Wellington. He graduated with a BA from Ripon College in 1882, and worked as a civil engineer in Montana and Wyoming before joining Johns Hopkins University in 1886. Receiving a Ph.D. in 1889 he also worked in the university museum as a curator and was a fellow in biology. He worked as a naturalist on the USFC Fish Hawk and then joined Clark University where he worked on neurobiology while also promoting biological education at all levels including sex education in high schools. He demonstrated fatigue in nerve cells by continuous stimulation of sympathetic and spinal ganglia of frogs. He conducted experiments on the effect of alcohol to rats, cats and dogs as part of the Committee of Fifty and its subcommittee on physiology under H. P. Bowditch of Harvard, J. S. Billings, R. H. Chittenden and W. H. Welch.
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This entry incorporates text from “Clifton F. Hodge” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.